HOWTO | mi­grate Boot Camp to a new mac

Be­fore trans­fer­ring your old Mac’s Boot Camp setup to a new Mac, open Boot Camp As­sis­tant on the new one to cre­ate a par­ti­tion for Win­dows and to down­load driv­ers to your empty USB flash drive. Once that’s done, quit Boot Camp As­sis­tant as we won’t in­stall Win­dows from scratch.

2 Open­ing Win­dows

On the old Mac, open Win­dow’s Start menu (or Win­dows 8’s Start screen) and type cmd to open a com­mand prompt. En­ter chkdsk /b to check your in­stal­la­tion is healthy and can be copied with Win­clone – if you’re un­fa­mil­iar with chkdsk, read http://bit.ly/mfwin­clone­tut.

3 Win­dows driv­ers

Our Mac mini is quite old, so we need to re­move the old Win­dows driv­ers – soft­ware that con­trols the pro­ces­sor, graph­ics card and other bits of hard­ware used in our spe­cific model. That’s a big task, but you can do it quickly with Sysprep, which you’ll find in C:\win­dows\sys­tem32\sysprep.

4 Out of the box

Se­lect the ‘Sys­tem Out-of-Box Ex­pe­ri­ence’ op­tion and check Gen­er­al­ize. Se­lect the Shut­down op­tion and then click OK. This strips out the old driv­ers, leav­ing a clean ver­sion of Win­dows that you can in­stall on any new Mac. When fin­ished, Win­dows will shut down, and you can restart in OS X.

5 Boot Camp backup

Thank­fully, things are more straight­for­ward on the Mac side. Here, Win­clone on our Mac mini has found our Boot Camp par­ti­tion, so we just need to click Save Im­age to copy the Boot Camp par­ti­tion to a file that we’ll name ‘Boot Camp Backup’. This will take a while with a large in­stal­la­tion.

6 Restor­ing your im­age

Copy the im­age file onto an ex­ter­nal drive, con­nect that drive to your new Mac and then open Win­clone. Drag and drop the im­age file into the Sources panel and then click Re­store to Vol­ume to copy the im­age’s con­tents onto the Boot Camp par­ti­tion that we cre­ated in step 1.

7 In­stall the cor­rect driv­ers

Now in­stall the up-to-date driv­ers from your USB drive which are needed for Win­dows to get the best out of the new Mac’s hard­ware. The Win­dows setup works per­fectly on the new iMac, and the whole-sys­tem mi­gra­tion even car­ries over the save files that con­tain your progress in games.

8 Win­dows ac­ti­va­tion

On your old Mac, go to Start menu > All Pro­grams > Ac­ces­sories (Win­dows 7) or type cmd at the Start screen (Win­dows 8). Right-click Com­mand Prompt and run it as an ad­min­is­tra­tor. En­ter slmgr -upk to re­move the prod­uct key. You can then ac­ti­vate Win­dows on your new Mac.